Various methods exist to publish a message that allows a large number of people to review it. For example, television and radio can convey messages to a mass number of people tuned into their respective broadcast. However, this type of publishing requires the people's attention at the moment the message is transmitted. If a person is not tuned into the broadcast, or is not paying attention when it is transmitted, the message will not be conveyed. This type of publishing is often referred to as Pushing, meaning that the message is pushed out (transmitted) even if no one is listening or requested the message. A major disadvantage of pushing is the inability for a person to immediately retrieve a specific message when they desire it. Often a person must wait through many undesired messages before the desired message is received. The on-demand method of publishing solves this problem by allowing a person to request (demand), then immediately receive the requested message when it is convenient or desired to do so. To accomplish this, on-demand publishing requires a two-way communication path between the sender of the message and the requestor of the message. One communication direction is used by the requestor to inform the message sender that a particular message is desired, and the other direction is used to send the message to the requestor. On-demand services have existed for many years. Services such as fax-on-demand and airline flight information systems all use a form of on-demand publishing. Some common message types that are published in an on-demand fashion include visual, textual and audio messages.
There are two common forms of on-demand publishing used for audio messages. Both rely on the use of pre-recorded or synthesized audio, but differ in the method they allow reviewers to listen to the message. The first method requires the audio message to reside on equipment connected to the telephone network. Requestors wishing to hear the message would simply dial a telephone number serviced by the equipment, and the equipment would announce the message to the caller. In order to play an audio message for more then one simultaneous caller, multiple telephone lines and associated playback equipment are needed to handle the desired number of simultaneous incoming calls. Obviously, this can become very expensive and difficult to implement, especially when the number of simultaneous callers exceeds a few hundred.
The second method of on-demand audio publishing uses the Internet to distribute an audio message. Typically, a webpage will contain a reference or hyperlink to the audio message file. When a requestor selects the reference, the audio message is sent to the requestor and played on the requestors' multimedia PC. Since webpages are typically stored on Internet servers that are designed to handle thousands or even millions of simultaneous requests, a single audio message can be reviewed by a large group of requestors at the same time. However, it is a time consuming and difficult task to put an audio message on a webpage. It includes many steps, which require special software, a computer, and the technical expertise to perform the required steps.
Another publishing method exists that is somewhat between the push and on-demand publishing methologies. Fax broadcasting uses such a method. Fax broadcasting is the sending of a single fax to many recipients. The recipients typically request to be included in a broadcast list (a list of recipients that are to receive the broadcasted fax). In a sense, they have “demanded” the fax. Since most fax machines are left powered on and ready to receiving a fax at any time, it can give the sending fax machine its full attention whenever a fax is being “broadcasted” to it. Most fax machines also print out or store the faxes they receive, allowing the user of the receiving fax machine to review the broadcasted fax when it is convenient to do so. However, fax broadcasting has several major disadvantages. Since a typical fax transmission takes a few minutes to complete, the time required to send a fax to ten thousand recipients could easily take hours or days to complete. To reduce this time, multiple fax devices can be used concurrently, with each fax device sending to a different recipient. This allows the sending of the fax to multiple recipients in the same time as it takes for a single fax device to send one fax to one recipient. Even with multiple fax devices, such a system could still be time consuming and costly to operate and maintain. Another potential disadvantage with fax broadcasting exists with documents such as price lists. Since price lists are typically updated periodically, there exists the potential for a reviewer to accidentally view an old or outdated price list because the reviewer may not know a more current list has been broadcasted or they may be unable to find it. In addition, since most fax machines print out the received faxes on paper even if they are never viewed, a large quantity of paper is consumed and often wasted when broadcasting a fax. In addition, because most fax machines immediately printout any received faxes, confidential documents are often compromised because other people may see the message before it is delivered to the intended recipient or while the message remains next to the fax machine.
The Internet has become a popular source for information and an excellent example of on-demand publishing. Information and messages, often called ‘content’, can be published on the Internet World Wide Web (WWW) by placing them on a ‘webpage’. Once connected to the Internet, a person using a web browser can visit the various locations on the WWW and view all the information and messages contained on its many webpages. To help find what they are looking for, people often use search engines to search for various keywords or phrases related to the topic of interest. Because the Internet is always ‘running’, the information and messages contained on the webpages are typically available for review at any time. Product information, news, recipes, travel directions, store hours, music, software and other information and items are all available on demand, at any time of the day or night.
However, publishing a message on the Internet can be a daunting task. Currently, there exists two main ways to publish information on the Internet. The first method requires the publisher to own or have access to a computer, web publishing software, an Internet web server and have the technical knowledge to use all of these items. These requirements severely limit the number of people that can publish content on the Internet. Furthermore, even if someone possessed the equipment and technical knowledge to use web publishing software, they are limited to the features, capabilities and the manner by which the web publishing software operates. A user can not simply use any software program to create and publish content on the Internet. The software program must be specifically capable of working with webpages (i.e. HTML-type files).
The second method involves the hiring of someone skilled in the art of web publishing (often referred to as a webmaster) to create, publish and maintain the content for you. This method can be very expensive, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. In addition, webmasters typically charge for each and every change that you want made to your webpage(s). With either method, the process can be time consuming and expensive, denying many people the benefits of publishing a message on the Internet can bring.
Various systems have been developed that allow a message to be reviewed on the Internet. Once such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,675,507 Charles R. Bobo, II “Message Storage and Delivery System”. This patent describes an invention that allows a user ‘on the go’ to review their own personal inbox of faxes and voice mail messages using a web browser. However, this invention is designed in a many-to-one configuration. Meaning, many third parties (friends, colleagues, clients, anyone, etc) can send a fax or leave a voice message for the one user of the invention. No one other than the single user can review the messages because the invention purposely restricts such review to just the single inbox owner for privacy purposes. Even if the reviewing security was removed from the invention so anyone can review the messages, the inventions' lack of security when accepting messages would allow any unauthorized person to post an undesirable message in anyone's inbox.
There are a few software programs available that use optical scanners to enter documents into a document imaging system and then make the documents available for viewing on the Internet using a web browser. Not only do these programs not handle audio messages, they are typically very expensive and require the user to own one or more computers and have the technical expertise to operate and maintain the entire system. In addition, the user must be physically in front of and using the PC running the document management software to publish a document. This issue alone severely limits the number of people that can use it to publish documents on the Internet.
An additional prior art exists (U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,883 “Hypertext Document Transport Mechanism for Firewall-compatible Distributed World-Wide Web Publishing”, Conley B. King Jr.) that allows a user to publish webpages by first packing them into an email and sending the email to a special web server that unpacks the hypertext files and places them in a memory area on a world-wide web server. This method not only requires the sender to have the necessary tools and skills to create the webpage, but they must also create the email in a special format that is required by the receiving server machine.
Another prior art (U.S. Pat. No. 5,945,989 “Method and apparatus for adding and altering content on websites”) describes an invention that allows a non-technical person to alter a websites' content using a typical telephone. However, all the various content, webpages and the website itself must already exist prior to the user placing a call to the invention to manipulate such content. Each different item of content must be pre-supplied to the invention and assigned a unique ID number before the invention will allow a caller to use that content. The caller would then call the invention and specify the ID of the content that they wish displayed on the webpage. Not only does this two-step process severely hamper the ability to quickly add new content to a webpage, but also a computer and technical expertise is required to initially create the website, webpages and content before the invention can even work with these items.
Additionally, many systems restrict the ways in which a message can be reviewed, such as publishing the message in a non-standard format, requiring the reviewer to use special hardware or software to review it. For example, Adobe Acrobat™ is often used to publish documents on the Internet. Not only is the publisher required to specially encode the message, the reviewer is required to obtain special Acrobat Reader software so they can review the document.
In addition, most systems that publish messages on the Internet do not keep records of when and who reviews the messages. Such statistics can be very helpful to people such as advertisers who want to know how much exposure an ad got.
Additionally, most systems that publish messages on the Internet do not check the message for inappropriate content; they just blindly publish the message. It is up to the users' [of the publishing program] judgment if a message should be published or not. The invention can optionally provide an automatic publishing restriction means to prevent the publishing of a message containing prohibited content.
Also, most systems can not notify one or more people when a new document has been published. Instead, reviewers are required to constantly check the system to see if a new document has been published.
To truly allow virtually anyone to publish a message on the Internet, a solution must exist that is easy, secure and economical to both publish and review the message.